It started with
a BBQ.
Not a business plan. Not a market study. Not a gap identified in a spreadsheet. A fire. A friend in the meat business. A piece of beef so extraordinary that the people around that table went quiet.
When the evening ended,
the guests left with one question.
The way people go quiet when something stops them mid-sentence.
“When you get access to this again—can you let us know?”
That question became Les Gastronomes.
Not immediately. Not with a plan. But with a belief—formed around that table—that food is never just food. It is always something else. A portal. A memory. A conversation that starts before anyone speaks.
The moment a room full of people stops and pays attention to what is in front of them, because what is in front of them is genuinely extraordinary.
We have spent fifteen years proving that belief in Dubai.
The standard has never
changed.
Through newsletters sent to a handful of people who trusted our palate. Through weekend deliveries to clients who kept calling back. Through dinners—La Table des Gastronomes—where food became the beginning of something, not simply the end of an evening.
Through a global pandemic that turned us into something essential overnight. Through years that tested whether we actually believed what we said we believed.
We did. We do.
We are not a supermarket. We are not a delivery app. We are not a catalogue of products competing on price.
We are the result of fifteen years of going to the source—to the producers, farms, estates, fishing boats and tea plantations—and asking one question: is this extraordinary?
If the answer is yes, it belongs here. If the answer is anything less, it does not.
That standard is not a marketing position. It is a personal one.
Trusted for some of the UAE’s most demanding tables.
From discerning private clients and international luxury brands to exceptional hospitality settings, we have built our reputation by understanding what quality means—and by delivering it consistently.
We also take small groups of guests to Sri Lanka to spend time inside Dilmah’s School of Tea, immersed in the people, landscapes and traditions behind one of the world’s most complex beverages.
We do all of this from Dubai—a city that has been home for forty years and that understands better than almost anywhere else what it means to seek the genuine article.
By referral and by reputation. Since 2011.
There were years
when we nearly were not.
We will not pretend otherwise. Building something real—without shortcuts, without compromising the standard and without selling what we did not believe in—takes longer than the market sometimes allows.
There were moments when the distance between what we were building and what the world was ready for felt impossible to bridge.
We stayed. Because the people around the table kept telling us we were right. Because the products we believed in kept proving themselves. Because real food—sourced properly, handled with care and presented with understanding—does something to people that cannot be manufactured.
That is the business we are in. And it is the only business we have ever wanted to be in.
Two people.
One table.
Fifteen years.
The easiest way to understand Les Gastronomes is to understand the two people who built it. They are not the same person and have never tried to be. One opens rooms. The other fills them with meaning.
Michel
Michel has spent his life finding things that are worth finding—and making sure the right people know about them.
Born in Lebanon and raised in the UAE, Michel grew up between cultures. He studied at the École hôtelière de Lausanne, where hospitality is not simply a subject but a philosophy, before training at Le Royal Monceau in Paris.
He then spent twelve years with British American Tobacco, working across markets and cultures and learning how brands are built, how trust is earned and why commercial intelligence and human intelligence are closely connected.
He brings to Les Gastronomes a relentless curiosity, a deep understanding of hospitality and a refusal to describe something as exceptional unless it genuinely is.
“Finding opportunities. Helping people. Building bridges. Solving problems. Meeting people.”
Stephanie
Stephanie does not talk about food the way most people in the food industry talk about food. She talks about it the way a person talks about memory.
French and Armenian, she was raised across two culinary traditions—two distinctive ways of understanding what food is for, what a table means and what it feels like to feed someone with love rather than efficiency.
She has lived in seven countries and worked with international brands, developing an understanding not only of what people want, but why they want it and what it means when they find it.
What she brought to Les Gastronomes was more than a skill set. It was a way of seeing: food as culture, as story and as the thing that can turn a moment into a memory.
She is writing a cookbook—Mémoires de table—that begins in her grandmother’s kitchen and travels through seven countries, two heritages and a lifetime of understanding what it means to share something real.
“Travelling. Reading. Cooking.”
Fifteen years. One standard.
The power of creating memories.
Les Gastronomes has lived through a pandemic, regional uncertainty and the particular difficulty of being early—of having the right vision before the market was ready to recognise it.
It has also earned the trust of people who could buy from anywhere and continue to choose Les Gastronomes.
That is not a coincidence. It is the result of two people who never stopped believing that real food—sourced with care and presented with understanding—is one of the most powerful things one person can offer another.
And it started with a BBQ.